ssolute life
and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the
restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied
only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did
not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823,
after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world."
Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner's
Life and Writings," with translations of passages from his drama, "The
Templars in Cyprus."

But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count
Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend
Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled "Wie ward Fritz
Stolberg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "Stolberg had
secretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purpose
to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into
a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment
of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility." [13]

The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of
romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the
resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was
furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the
Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat
mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai,
the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism had
narrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of
_Traeumerei_ and _Schwaermerei_--of superstition and fanaticism. "Dry
light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has
looked too steadily on the _lumen siccum_ of the reason; and then
imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into
beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the
determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason.
Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind
into a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's
"Maehrchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this
"renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," Scott's
"Demonology," and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendencies
of 1770 to 1780," says Scherer, "which had now